Digiday+ Research: Independent agencies bear the cost of data collection

ingredients factory belt

This research is based on unique data collected from our proprietary audience of publisher, agency, brand and tech insiders. It’s available to Digiday+ members. More from the series →

Agencies normally aren’t shy about passing work costs on to their clients. Yet as more agencies work to gather and store data about internet users, a significant percentage of independent agencies are bearing that cost on their own, according to new Digiday+ research. 

In November, Digiday polled several dozen agency and brand professionals on a number of topics, including how they are preparing for returns to the office and what kinds of vaccination policies their employers have. Forty independent agency professionals with knowledge of how their organizations approach data collection answered questions about that practice. 

While a significant chunk of independent agencies do not offer this kind of service to clients, among those that do, close to half said they bear the costs themselves, rather than passing it on to clients. 

Anecdotally, respondents who said they worked at holding company agencies were much less likely to pass the costs on, but an insufficient number of holding company agency respondents weighed in on the topic.

While agencies have been collecting data about internet users for years, the relationship to that data — and to the third party brokers that provide it — has changed considerably since Google said it would depreciate support for third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. 

The data is typically one service among many agencies provided to clients. Two thirds of the independent agency respondents indicated their agencies offered some combination of creative, media and performance marketing services to their clients. 

https://digiday.com/?p=435520

More in Marketing

Best Buy, Lowe’s chief marketing officers explain why they launched new influencer programs

CMOs launched these new programs in response to the growing importance of influencers in recommending products.

Agencies create specialist units to help marketers’ solve for AI search gatekeepers

Wpromote, Kepler and Jellyfish practices aim to illuminate impact of black box LLMs’ understanding of brands search and social efforts.

What AI startup Cluely gets — and ad tech forgets — about attention

Cluely launched a narrative before it launched a tool. And somehow, it’s working.